Across the Nala: Caste, Queerness, and the Cartography of Exclusion in the City

The city is often imagined as a space of anonymity—a place where identities dissolve into crowds, where caste becomes invisible, and where modern life promises escape from the rigidities of the village. Yet Across the Nala: A Queer Dalit Bahujan Zine of Stories from Delhi dismantles this illusion with quiet force, revealing that the city is not free of caste but is instead deeply mapped by it—inscribed in neighbourhoods, infrastructures, relationships, and even desire itself. Emerging from a storytelling workshop among Dalit queer individuals, the zine assembles lived experiences into what can be understood as a counter-cartography of Delhi: not a map of roads and landmarks, but of exclusion, shame, longing, and fragile belonging. At the center of this cartography lies the metaphor of the “nala”—a drain—an image that draws attention to what the city expels, both materially and socially. Unlike rivers, which carry cultural significance, the nala signifies waste, abjection, and that which must remain unseen; in this sense, it becomes an apt metaphor for how Dalit queer lives are positioned within urban space—present yet disavowed.

Through its narratives, the zine makes visible how caste geography operates within the city. Delhi is not merely divided administratively but affectively; neighbourhoods carry meanings, reputations, and hierarchies that shape social interaction. To disclose one’s location is never neutral—it can determine desirability, acceptance, or rejection. Accounts of being excluded on dating apps due to one’s locality reveal how caste operates subtly yet pervasively, embedding itself in the language of preference and taste. The city, therefore, is not a neutral backdrop but an active participant in the production of inequality. For Dalit queer individuals, this produces a layered marginality: queer spaces, often imagined as inclusive, remain structured by caste-coded norms. One may achieve visibility as queer but remain excluded as Dalit; one may enter the city but never fully inhabit it. The promise of urban anonymity collapses under the persistence of caste recognition, revealing that visibility does not necessarily translate into belonging.

Yet the zine does not merely document exclusion; it also traces fragile and alternative forms of belonging that emerge within and against these structures. Instead of ownership-based belonging—rooted in property, capital, or dominance—it gestures toward a relational form of inhabiting the city, grounded in fleeting connections, friendships, shared moments, and memory. This mode of belonging is ephemeral and precarious, but it allows for presence without full incorporation. At the same time, this presence is marked by anxiety. Contributors describe an ongoing negotiation with space, appearance, and identity—an awareness of being constantly read, evaluated, and potentially excluded. Clothing, speech, and self-presentation become sites of adjustment, revealing how the body itself is shaped by the need to navigate hostile environments. Withholding emerges as a strategy—concealing aspects of identity to gain access—but this strategy comes at the cost of fragmentation, producing a distance between self and representation.

What the zine ultimately foregrounds is caste as lived affect rather than abstract structure. It shows how caste shapes not only access to resources but also the emotional texture of everyday life—feelings of shame, desire, fear, and longing. In doing so, it challenges mainstream queer discourse, which often assumes a universal subject defined primarily by sexuality or gender. By centering caste, the zine exposes the limits of such frameworks, asking who gets to feel safe, who is desired, and whose bodies remain marginal even within spaces of supposed inclusion. It complicates the idea of urban progress, demonstrating that while the city may offer certain freedoms, these freedoms are unevenly distributed. The urban does not erase caste; it reorganizes it.

The form of the zine itself reinforces this intervention. As a collaborative, self-published work, it resists the authority and sanitisation of institutional knowledge production. Its fragmented, intimate, and multi-voiced structure mirrors the complexity of the experiences it documents, refusing singular narratives or neat conclusions. In this sense, it is not only a representation of Dalit queer life but a method of thinking—one that foregrounds what is usually ignored, maps what is usually hidden, and insists on the validity of lived experience as a site of knowledge. Ultimately, Across the Nala forces a rethinking of the city—not as a neutral space of opportunity, but as a terrain of power where caste, class, and sexuality intersect in deeply unequal ways. It reminds us that belonging is never given but constantly negotiated, and that any account of urban life that ignores caste remains fundamentally incomplete.